Pah. The American economy and American businesses are built on the quick buck. As soon as they can outsource it, they’re off. I look at the company I work for, American born and bred, created the industry, was once the world leader. Now spends all its time cutting expensive (experienced) American workers to outsource to Poland and India. Mostly to India at this stage.

This is capitalism working properly, improving living conditions for hundreds of millions of people around the world. China used to have 97% of it’s population engaged in agriculture.

Using trade barriers in an attempt to turn back the clock to some kind of post-war golden age of US manufacturing isn’t going to work, it’s just going to make Americans poorer because the products they consume are going to get more expensive.

Might keep Tesla around for a while longer though.

The middle class is getting poorer and the factory jobs/blue collar workers have disappeared so what is the incentive to maintain the status quo for these people? The fear that they might not be able to afford the latest smartphone ? What good is that if your only viable jobs are uber or deliveroo

Pah. The American economy and American businesses are built on the quick buck. As soon as they can outsource it, they’re off. I look at the company I work for, American born and bred, created the industry, was once the world leader. Now spends all its time cutting expensive (experienced) American workers to outsource to Poland and India. Mostly to India at this stage.

This is capitalism working properly, improving living conditions for hundreds of millions of people around the world. China used to have 97% of it’s population engaged in agriculture.

Using trade barriers in an attempt to turn back the clock to some kind of post-war golden age of US manufacturing isn’t going to work, it’s just going to make Americans poorer because the products they consume are going to get more expensive.

Might keep Tesla around for a while longer though.

The middle class is getting poorer and the factory jobs/blue collar workers have disappeared so what is the incentive to maintain the status quo for these people? The fear that they might not be able to afford the latest smartphone ? What good is that if your only viable jobs are uber or deliveroo

The aggregate benefit of hundreds of millions of Chinese becoming richer appears to be greater than the aggregate disbenefit of a few million, or even a few tens of millions of Americans becoming poorer, so in straightforward utilitarian terms, Eschatologist is correct. Still, it’s unlikely many people take much personal satisfaction from being one of the eggs cracked into making the omelette.

The aggregate benefit of hundreds of millions of Chinese becoming richer appears to be greater than the aggregate disbenefit of a few million, or even a few tens of millions of Americans becoming poorer, so in straightforward utilitarian terms, Eschatologist is correct. Still, it’s unlikely many people take much personal satisfaction from being one of the eggs cracked into making the omelette.

I’m not trying to offset the happiness of the average Chinese against the misery of the average American.

I simply don’t think America has a wealth problem. It has a wealth distribution problem.

Pah. The American economy and American businesses are built on the quick buck. As soon as they can outsource it, they’re off. I look at the company I work for, American born and bred, created the industry, was once the world leader. Now spends all its time cutting expensive (experienced) American workers to outsource to Poland and India. Mostly to India at this stage.

This is capitalism working properly, improving living conditions for hundreds of millions of people around the world. China used to have 97% of it’s population engaged in agriculture.

Using trade barriers in an attempt to turn back the clock to some kind of post-war golden age of US manufacturing isn’t going to work, it’s just going to make Americans poorer because the products they consume are going to get more expensive.

Might keep Tesla around for a while longer though.

**The middle class is getting poorer and the factory jobs/blue collar workers have disappeared **so what is the incentive to maintain the status quo for these people? The fear that they might not be able to afford the latest smartphone ? What good is that if your only viable jobs are uber or deliveroo

Are the trade deals with Canada responsible for this? Have any trade deals or tariffs been pointed out as what is causing the problem? The reaction to Trudeau saying that Canada would retaliate to US tariffs with tariffs of their own was pretty ridiculous.

The bottom line is it costs more to build stuff in the USA because we are better off than many other regions of the world. And by outsourcing the production of many goods and services we make some workers worse off while making those products cheaper for everyone in the USA. This is a good trade for a country where prices are inherently higher. Raising prices on these goods via tariffs doesn’t fix the problem it tries to solve and won’t lead to a trade surplus or fairer trade. In fact, it just results in higher costs for US consumers which makes most of us worse off.

NB – One result of increasing globalization is that more of national income has flowed to corporations which has led to higher inequality. But again, inequality is a problem that tariffs won’t fix. Unfortunately, much of the populism we are seeing today seems to be aimed at globalization when it should be aimed at inequality.

Why China Has Already Lost the Trade War
China is dependent on exports to the US and foreign exchange reserves.

The major developed economies have allowed China to get away with its protectionism and interventionism measures because it was the engine of growth of the world economy.

Many talk about trade war as if it were something new and unexpected, but it’s not. The world has been in a trade war for years. The United States has denounced trade barriers imposed by China, the European Union, and other countries for many years, and the World Trade Organization did little about it. The 2017 National Trade Estimate Report on Foreign Trade Barriers filled more than 70 pages outlining direct barriers imposed on the export of U.S. goods and services.
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What the Trump administration is doing now is a negotiation tactic—aggressive, bulldozer-type, and, of course, risky.
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China needs the U.S. surplus more than the United States needs China’s trade and finances. And that is why the trade war will not happen—because China has already lost.
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China’s currency is not backed by either global use nor gold—not at all. It is as unsupported as any fiat currency, like the U.S. dollar, but much less traded and used as a store of value. China’s gold reserves are an insignificant fraction of its money supply.
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Also, contrary to popular opinion, China does not have a nuclear option on the U.S. debt. For once, it is not the main owner of U.S. bonds, not even close; China has less than 8.6 percent of U.S. bonds outstanding.
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The Federal Reserve and the main U.S. Fixed Income funds could buy the bonds in a very short period of time, a week at most. Whether the central bank of the United States or the central bank of China owns the Treasury bonds doesn’t make a difference to the broader U.S. money supply.

It looks like the Yanks are taking the China/US trade war to the next level by arresting the CFO of Huawei in Canada and seeking her extradition to the US. This comes on the back of a couple of Telco’s backing out of using them as a vendor for their 5G kit in Britain, Australia and NZ.

It looks like the Yanks are taking the China/US trade war to the next level by arresting the CFO of Huawei in Canada and seeking her extradition to the US. This comes on the back of a couple of Telco’s backing out of using them as a vendor for their 5G kit in Britain, Australia and NZ.

This looks like the key take away, less Trade War more Cold War.

The company was already under scrutiny by US intelligence officials who deemed the company a national security threat.

You have to go back to stories like ithe below in May of this year, to get a better view on the long game and to what is really going on. The infiltration by communist China deep into the US and US military infrastructure and personnel seems to be what is at play here, nor is it by accident.

Washington (AFP) - Personnel on US military bases can no longer buy phones and other gear manufactured by Chinese firms Huawei and ZTE, after the Pentagon said the devices pose an “unacceptable” security risk.

Basically even as a consumer, you have to treat anything electronic manufactured in China especially by Chinese companies as spyware if it has a camera, mic and can connect to the net. I would include Toys in that.

There was an incident discovered earlier in the year where a lot of US Internet traffic from one of their Telco’s was being routed through China Telecom and then back. It appears they have become quite brazen of late. I’ll see if I can find the link.

There was an incident discovered earlier in the year where a lot of US Internet traffic from one of their Telco’s was being routed through China Telecom and then back. It appears they have become quite brazen of late. I’ll see if I can find the link.

Australia and NZ have banned Huawei equipment from 5G telecoms due to security risk
and a new law in China requires any domestic firm to assist the government when asked

There may be a lot more than meets the eye in Canada’s shock arrest, at US behest, of Huawei’s CFO and heir apparent Meng Wanzhou (link below).

Chinese sources have assembled the following facts:

• April 2017: A director of Chinese tech giant Huawei personally escorts famed Shanghai-born physicist Zhang Shoucheng from the latter’s hotel in Shenzhen. Jackson & Wood Professor of Physics at Stanford University, Zhang was in town to attend an IT summit.

• Sept. 2018: Prof. Zhang receives a European physics award, one of his many honors. His work in quantum physics is expected to revolutionize the global semiconductor industry. Yang Zhenning, the first Chinese scientist to receive the Nobel Physics Prize (1957), had predicted that Zhang would be the next one.

• Dec. 1, 2018: Prof. Zhang and Meng Wanzhou are expected to attend a dinner in Argentina, where the G20 summit is being held.

• Dec. 1, 2018: On her way there, Meng is arrested in transit by the Canadian government.

• Dec. 1, 2018: Prof. Zhang falls to his death from a building in the US, allegedly a suicide. Said to be suffering from depression, he was 55.

• Dec. 1, 2018: A nighttime fire breaks out at a factory of Holland’s ASML, the world’s leading manufacturer of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography technology. EUV is crucial to the production of the next generation of semi-conductors, which US and Chinese tech firms as well as Korea’s Samsung are competing to be first to bring to market. Leading Chinese semiconductor producer SMIC is known to have ordered EUV technology worth US$120 million from ASML, for scheduled delivery early in 2019. After the fire, ASML announced that it expected delays in shipments of its products, notably early 2019.

US general has a question for Google: Why will you work with China but not us?
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Dunford, who’s also the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
He also added, according to various reports of his comments: “I’m not sure that people at Google will enjoy a world order that is informed by the norms and standards of Russia or China.”
Dunbar’s comments echoed remarks along these same lines also today from US Sen. Mark Warner of Virgina, who spoke at an event hosted by the Center for New American Security. “It’s pretty amazing to me that Google is actually looking to work with China to develop a censored version of its search engine in China,” Warner said . “Today China’s cyber and censorship infrastructure is the envy of authoritarian regimes around the world. China is now exporting both its technology and its cyber-sovereignty doctrine to countries like Venezuela, Ethiopia, and Pakistan.”
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Meanwhile, Google earlier this year backed out of a $10 billion cloud computing contract with the US Defense Department after employees internally revolted over working with the military to do things like help them analyze aerial drone imagery.

If 5G equipment bans from the United States, Australia, and New Zealand weren’t enough this year, Huawei will end 2018 on an even worse note: Kyodo News reports that Japan’s government has decided to block the Chinese company and its smaller rival ZTE from network hardware procurement. Not coincidentally, Canadian authorities are publicly discussing a similar ban following last week’s arrest of Huawei’s CFO.

I saw it noted Nokia share price has gained as an affect of the news of competitors difficulties, not sure how true that is but might be something in it with the 5G race. - marketwatch.com/investing/stock/NOK

China is sliding into a manufacturing recession as a wave of bond defaults sweep through the corporate sector, signalling yet further trouble for the battered global economy.

The official PMI survey for December slumped below the boom-bust line to 49.4. New export orders slid to crisis levels of 46.6 last seen in the depths of the Chinese currency scare of 2015.

“The worst is yet to come,” said the Japanese bank Nomura. An autumn boost from Chinese exporters is fading: they have already front-loaded shipments to the US to beat a possible jump in tariffs by the Trump administration.

China’s factory activity contracted for the first time in over two years in December, highlighting the challenges facing Beijing as it seeks to end a bruising trade war with Washington and reduce the risk of a sharper economic slowdown in 2019.

Chinese manufacturing had an even worse December than expected, more data show

•Results of a private survey on China’s manufacturing for the month of December showed factory activity contracted amid a trade dispute with the U.S.
•The Caixin/Markit Manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ index (PMI), a private survey, fell to 49.7 in December from 50.2 in November.